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I think she fled from the famous cockroaches at the Gran Hotel Barrancales.
    Their mission was to scan several sections of the painting, send them back in digital form to Holland, and then await instructions. Boris and Aldo did all the work: they got on well despite not being able to exchange a single word. Seeing them together was striking: the tall, thin Boris with a bald patch surrounded by a curtain of long, blond hair, and Aldo, short and stout, with a spiky black mop. They lowered the big rolls between the two of them and placed them in the scanner, which could copy two meters of canvas every five minutes. The first day I tried to help them, but soon realized I was simply getting in the way whenever they were carrying a roll or trying to adjust it on the scanner. After that I stayed out of it, and stood with my arms by my side next to Hanna, who probably felt as I did.
    I talked with her a little in the shade of the shed while the other two got on with their work. I showed her how we drink mate tea, and answered her questions about Salvatierra and the river. She told me, in Spanish that sounded as if it were being pronounced backwards, about her postgraduate studies in baroque art of the Americas, her interest in the Jesuits’ influence, her work with Boris even though they were now separated. I won’t deny that I fantasized about a brief fling with such a pretty woman, but nothing happened. I never made a move, and besides, I don’t think that going to bed with a guy like me formed part of her search for the Latin American exotic. The next day, she left to visit the Jesuit ruins at San Ignacio in Misiones.

17
    With the scanning well underway, I decided to go to the Post Office building where Salvatierra had worked for many years. He started there back in 1935, taken in by one of my grandfather’s brothers, who couldn’t bear to see him wandering about by the river without doing anything useful. My grandfather hadn’t sent him to school, and had accepted he would not become a stockbreeder like his brothers. Instead, he let Salvatierra roam without keeping too close an eye on him, perhaps hoping that the consequences of his lack of interest would follow naturally. But, contrary to what they all expected, my father did not do badly in life. Thanks to his cousins’ insistence as teachers, he could write and spell impeccably, and was very good at letter writing. In fact, he was much better educated than my uncles, whose skill on horseback or with a lasso was of little use to them when it came to administering the lands they first inherited and then were forced to sell when they went bankrupt some years later. Salvatierra began at the Post Office as an assistant clerk, but gradually made a position for himself.
    I was received at the old Post Office building with suspicion. I asked several employees if they remembered Juan Salvatierra or if they knew of anybody who had worked there since before 1975, the year he retired. They all passed me on to someone else, down gloomy corridors with incredibly high doors and vast offices. Our voices sounded tiny in there, out of proportion, as if we were a race of dwarves living in a building that had once housed giants.
    In one of the offices I was received by a bony, elderly woman. She was sucking on a cigarette, and had big, green eyes. She was very moved when I explained who I was, and said that now she understood why when I first appeared, my face looked familiar. She invited me in, and we talked for a while.
    Her name was Eugenia Rocamora and she had begun working there when she was twenty. She showed me what had been Salvatierra’s office (I already knew it, he used to take me there sometimes as a boy). She told me how much everyone respected and appreciated him. She brought out an old photograph of the Post Office staff gathered on the entrance steps, among them a smiling Salvatierra.
    “And that was me. Look how pretty I once was,” she said, glancing at me with a